The Truth About Fragile Things Read online

  ASIN B01G3ZP05A

  Copyright © Regina Sirois, 2016

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without expressed written consent of the author except in cases of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  v1.01

  First Published 06/07/2016

  www.reginasirois.com

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  * * *

  THE ESSENTIAL FACTS CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER 3 CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 5 CHAPTER 6 CHAPTER 7 CHAPTER 8 CHAPTER 9

  * * *

  CHAPTER 10 CHAPTER 11 CHAPTER 12 CHAPTER 13 CHAPTER 14 CHAPTER 15 CHAPTER 16 CHAPTER 17 CHAPTER 18 CHAPTER 19

  * * *

  CHAPTER 20 CHAPTER 21 CHAPTER 22 CHAPTER 23 CHAPTER 24 CHAPTER 25 CHAPTER 26 CHAPTER 27 CHAPTER 28 CHAPTER 29

  * * *

  CHAPTER 30 CHAPTER 31 CHAPTER 32 CHAPTER 33 CHAPTER 34 CHAPTER 35 CHAPTER 36 CHAPTER 37 CHAPTER 38 CHAPTER 39

  * * *

  CHAPTER 40 CHAPTER 41

  * * *

  More from Regina Sirois

  TO JUSTIN,

  MY CO-ADVENTURER IN THE HALLS OF HIGH SCHOOL, THE OZARK WOODS, THE SPRING-FED RIVERS, THE MUSEUMS OF ART, THE RAISING OF CHILDREN, AND EVERY GREAT DISCOVERY OF MY LIFE.

  YOU ARE MY BUCKET LIST.

  THE ESSENTIAL FACTS:

  My name is Megan Riddick.

  I am a junior in high school.

  I killed a man when I was two years old.

  It all started with a stuffed monkey and a butterfly.

  I don’t want to tell this story.

  CHAPTER 1

  Most days I take my lunch down to Mrs. Schatz’s classroom and eat with her while we discuss her college theater days or my family or other teachers in the school. I’ve been doing it for over a year. I’ve never belonged in a cafeteria. Not because I don’t have anyone to sit by or I don’t know how to make conversation. I don’t belong in the cafeteria because it makes me tired.

  There are only two acceptable facial expressions at a lunch table: smiling or sarcastically smirking. That’s probably oversimplifying because there are always a few criers reeling from break-ups or bad grades. But even if you add them as their own category that only leaves smiling, sarcasm, and crying. I really don’t do any of those well. At least, not without a script.

  Last year, when Mrs. Schatz was giving me extra help on Steel Magnolias, we started going over my scenes together in her room at lunchtime. And then never stopped. I think she likes to avoid the teachers’ lounge as much as I like to avoid the lunchroom. But she leaves for a week every year to go to a drama convention where she hears about new scripts and plays and stage equipment and that’s why I was sitting at a lunch table with Phillip in the middle of September. I couldn’t even escape to the courtyard like I planned because a heavy rain drenched the school, pounding on the skylights above the lunch tables and making it more impossible than usual to hear anything anyone said. I used that as my excuse to just nod and stare at my food.

  Phillip pushed his tray toward me and nearly yelled, “Aren’t you hungry?”

  I raised my eyebrows at the stack of hamburgers on his tray. “Are you really going to eat all of those?” I asked.

  “Are you really going to eat that?” he countered, looking at my bowl of salad. Water from the iceberg lettuce had pooled at the bottom and mixed with my ranch dressing. I sighed and pushed it away. “No.”

  “Good. Then you have time to help me.” He reached into his bag. “Walker gave us theorems and I still have three left. I’ll give you a hamburger.”

  “I’m not doing your homework,” I told him. I resisted looking down at the paper, but there was nowhere else to look. “Your handwriting is embarrassing.” The page was covered in scrawled numbers that looked like someone wrote them while closing his eyes. During a spasm. In the middle of an earthquake.

  “I won’t get credit if I don’t have it done,” he whined. He changed his expression, running his gaze across my face and took some of my dark hair between his fingers, caressing it. “I can always count on you.”

  “Phillip, when has your sex appeal ever worked on me? Ever?” I took my hair back and bravely prodded my salad. “You’re an imbecile.”

  I know he recognized the stubborn glint in my eye because he reached across me to Brittany Pearson who is great at volleyball but couldn’t figure the circumference of a circle to save her life, let alone theorems. “Brittany, will you help me?” he pleaded.

  “I dare you,” I breathed out the words so only he could hear. Phillip pushed the paper even farther toward Brittany, pressing his curly hair against my cheek.

  “Get off of my face,” I said, shoving his head. It didn’t matter. He barely moved. Phillip inherited a really big head from his dad.

  Brittany’s smile lit up when Phillip singled her out but then fell as soon as she looked down and saw the problem.

  I sighed and took the paper. “That’s just mean,” I hissed at Phillip. “Don’t worry about it, Brittany,” I told her. She gave Phil an apologetic shrug and I grabbed his pencil so hard the lead snapped off. “Now I can’t do it,” I told him. “I can’t write if the…”

  “Pencil isn’t sharp,” Phil finished for me. He blinked his thick lashes and said, “Brittany, do you have a sharp pencil?”

  Thrilled to be asked something more up her alley, she dug into her bag and came up with one I found acceptable.

  “Thank you,” Phillip said. “That is one beautiful pencil.” He gave her a level gaze, far too intense for a writing utensil. “And sorry about Megan. She is very difficult to deal with sometimes.”

  The group within hearing range laughed while I hunched over the paper, hiding my face. I put on a calm, blank expression and started solving for f. I always look up when I’m figuring something out so when I couldn’t resist the urge any longer I directed my stare through the windows to the rose bushes in the courtyard, their branches shivering under the deluge of gray rain. My eyes finally unfocused from the hazy scene when someone across the cafeteria screamed. I jerked around in unison with a hundred other students to see a small knot of soccer players laughing over a ketchup accident. I glanced back at Phillip’s paper, telling myself it wasn’t a real scream. Not the kind I’m afraid of. I bent my head down to ensure the scenes flashing like a faded newsreel in my mind didn’t show in my eyes.

  At the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City there is a wishing well where people have dropped cheap penny hopes for decades. Beside it on most fair weather days a man in a battered vest and white hair stands for a few hours hoping to collect slightly larger donations. He showed up sometime in the Clinton administration and is still at it. He carries a stuffed monkey and tries to divert coins from the wishing well to his shapeless hat by playing a street organ beside a weathered sign that reads ‘Feed the Monkey.’ Fifteen years ago on a summer morning so humid the flower petals had curled into wilted heaps, a mother grudgingly handed him a torn dollar bill while her two-year-old girl inspected one of the wrinkled blossoms. When an orange butterfly flew toward the street, the girl followed on determined, chubby legs. Four steps and she had slipped between the bumper of a Ford and a flashy Mustang. Four more and she was in the street with the coasting butterfly. Before her mother could scream, before the monkey man could turn his head, before the Jeep Cherokee cruising down Nichols Road could veer away, there was a shriek of brakes, a hopeless grunt and the surprisingly soft but sickening t
hud of a fragile body colliding with the bug-spattered grill.

  The child’s scream tore through the air over the noise of slamming car doors and yelling onlookers, her arms and legs grated with skid marks of blood. But it was not the tiny girl that the people ran toward first; it was the broken body of the man who’d thrown her out of harm’s way.

  Brittany’s voice cut the memory short. “Is that girl looking at us?” It took a moment to place myself back in the deafening lunchroom. Brittany nudged me and pointed with her shoulder across the room to one of the freshman tables. They aren’t required to sit together. They just huddle for security. The rest looked huddled, at least. Not the girl Brittany pointed out. She had thick, light hair and stared from beneath slanted eyebrows, her eyes unabashedly direct and angry. I flinched and glanced behind me to see if she was glaring at someone else, but when I turned back she only seemed more disgusted.

  Other people blush when they are embarrassed or confused. I go from pale to paler. The blood always falls out of my face, out of my heart, and drops somewhere around my knees.

  “I think she’s looking at me, actually,” I said.

  Phillip’s eyes darted to the girl. Her baby round cheeks and soft mouth contrasted starkly with her defiant expression. If she smiled she would be something close to adorable. Phil glared back to scare her away, but it did the opposite. The girl stood up and took one fearless step closer to us before she gave a lazy, insolent turn and dropped her entire tray into the trashcan. With a hard smile she walked out of the room.

  “What’s her deal?” Phil asked.

  I curled my toes in my shoes and pushed them against the dirty linoleum floor. “I’ve never seen her in my life. She probably thought I was someone else.”

  Brittany said something dismissive about freshmen while I grabbed the math sheet and concentrated on each scratching line of the pencil lead, tracing a triangle needlessly.

  “I’ve never seen her in my life,” I repeated quietly, wondering why it felt like a lie.

  As I faded from the table’s attention, the memory reel picked up where it left off, never able to end unfinished.

  The small girl’s eyes grew glazed and unfocused with terror and commotion. Policemen dropped their morning coffees and yelled into radios as they pounded past the sprinkling fountains.

  The girl’s mother pulled her off the rough asphalt and searched her bruised body with disbelieving eyes. An off-duty nurse jumped over the iron rail of a restaurant patio and joined them, speaking in a rushed, clinical voice as she looked into the child’s pupils, lifted each soft arm, flexed each bleeding knee. The girl would need nothing more than three Band-Aids and some comforting words.

  As the knot of onlookers tightened around the injured man, he made one effort to sit up before hands pressed him down and people ordered him not to move. He turned his head to the side and uttered two unintelligible words. When he spotted the bleeding girl in her mother’s arms he stopped mid-sentence and closed his eyes. The trembling mother breathed out fractured words against her daughter's neck that a police officer overheard and wrote down in letters as shaky as her voice. I’m sorry. Thank you. Thank you. And then the pleading demand—Be okay!

  While the man clung feebly to the last sounds he would ever know, the butterfly landed somewhere. That’s what I always think about when the reel finishes; where did the butterfly end up? No one will ever know. I imagine it was near enough that the dying man heard the wings open, felt them beat into the sky. Maybe they flew away together.

  CHAPTER 2

  After school I dumped my books into my backpack while Alicia practiced her lines from our fifth hour drama class for our graded scenes on Friday. Friday is always performance day.

  “Does my southern accent sound a little British?” Alicia asked as she leaned against the locker next to mine and checked her hair in my mirror. I was still thinking of my essay from my last class so I answered without registering the question.

  “Yes.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes?” I said it more like a question because I didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “What do I do? I’ll sound like Mary Poppins!” Her voice squeaked in a way that definitely did not sound like Mary Poppins.

  “Frankly my dear, I don’t…” I teased.

  “Shut up!” she commanded. “Fix it! Please, Megan, fix it. I have to get it right.”

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked her as I hoisted my bag over my shoulder. I groaned under the weight.

  “Damsel in distress?” Phillip asked. I never heard him coming up behind us.

  “Yes,” I answered and gave him no warning before dropping my bag into his hands. He just managed to catch it.

  “Not a Sherpa,” he informed me.

  “Phillip, does my Southern accent sound British?” Alicia asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You haven’t heard it yet!” she screeched.

  I laughed as he managed to keep a serious face. “Okay, let’s hear it.”

  She looked at both of us, gave up, and slammed my locker shut. “I need to find new friends.”

  Phil lowered his voice. “How about Freaky Freshman? I’m sure she has several friend vacancies. How weird was that?”

  “Who?” Alicia looked around the thinly populated hall.

  “Some freshman has a problem with Megan,” Phil said. “She was a total freak show.” He filled Alicia in on our lunchroom experience and I made sure to look as impassive as possible. It had taken two hours to lose the low vibration in the pit of my stomach and I was determined not to let it rattle me again.

  “I really think she mistook me for someone else.” The reassuring words were more for me than them.

  “Because you have so many doppelgangers.” Alicia nailed me with a sarcastic stare.

  “Probably as many as the next person,” I reasoned.

  “Probably not.” She let her eyes sweep over me. I think it was meant as a compliment, but in my opinion I am too strange to be pretty. Nothing like the blond models smiling from every magazine cover. I’m narrow and straight, not at all voluptuous. And then, in the middle of all my long, spare lines, I have black eyebrows that swoop in high arches and cheekbones that slide down and then swing back up, which has always made people speculate about my “ethnicity”, when in truth I am as plain, pale white as they come.

  Phillip stopped walking and grabbed the back of my shirt. I stumbled a little on my arrested step and turned to him to see if he was playing a joke. Slapstick happens to be his thing.

  “What? Do you want me to carry my own bag?” I held out my hand.

  Instead of a twenty-pound canvas backpack he filled my hand with his fingers and pulled me closer. “She’s in front of the doors,” he murmured.

  Alicia and I both looked up to the bank of glass doors that empty into the parking lot. Outside stood the girl. She was shorter and curvier than I remembered, but with beautiful posture. There was a line to her body that reminded me of a dancer.

  She scanned the crowds, her eyes roaming over the stream of students, her nonchalant face unable to hide the anger that radiated from her. “Is she looking for me?” I asked, sliding closer to the brick wall.

  “Is she going to pick a fight?” Phil’s voice was vibrant with anticipation. He turned his grin to me and shook his eyebrows up and down. “You name the mud pit and I’ll sell the tickets. You want to join them, Alicia? You’re looking enticing today.”

  I couldn’t think of a biting retort and didn’t want to hear Alicia’s flattered reply. “Should I just go introduce myself and then she’ll see that I have no idea who she is?”

  “Five bucks,” Alicia dared me. “Just walk up and tell her your name. We’ll make sure she doesn’t hit you twice.”

  “Twice?” I asked.

  “If she’s fast she might sneak in the first one, but Phil and I will definitely stop her before she punches you twice.”

  I swallowed and squared my shoulders.
“Your Southern accent sounds Australian,” I informed her.

  “Don’t tick off your bodyguards,” she warned.

  “I’m doing it. This is stupid. I’ve never even seen her before. If I just talk to her…” I waved them behind me and sped up. If you pretend you are confident it almost works.

  The girl’s face was a dark olive and her hair the color of wet sand. Even from a distance her skin looked soft. She spotted me just as I got to the door, the glass standing between her surprised eyes and mine. I opened it, slipped between a few people and stepped up to her. I held back a few feet so my height wouldn’t intimidate her. She only came to my mouth.

  “Hi. I don’t know your name, but I’m Megan Riddick,” I started. “It seemed—”

  She interrupted me with two short words that sliced off her tongue. “I know.”

  “You know me?”

  Her lips cracked open, something decidedly unpleasant about to escape before she snapped them shut. “You’re clueless,” she said and darted away, taking the stairs two at a time.

  “What did you do?” Phillip asked as he approached me from behind. “You scared the…”

  “She wasn’t scared,” I told him. “She was mad. What am I clueless about?” I asked him, even though he hadn’t heard her comment. Although, giving credit where it’s due, her word did fit at the moment.

  “Who is she?” Alicia asked.

  “I have no idea.” The girl disappeared around the edge of the building and I considered following, but that required running and I don’t really do that. You can’t look dignified and run. Gym was the darkest year of my life.

  “What did she say?” Phil asked.

  “She said she knew who I was,” I answered.

  “Lock your doors tonight, Megan,” Alicia said. “She might have escaped from somewhere.”